Hiroshi Kitamura

Associate Professor, History, Director of Graduate Studies

Office: Blair 340Phone: 757-221-3740Email: [[hxkita]]Regional Areas of Research: East and South Asia, United StatesThematic Areas of Research: Comparative and Transnational, International Relations, Pacific World/Pacific Rim, Popular Culture and Media

Background

Born and raised in Japan, Hiroshi Kitamura came to the United States in 1991 and earned a B.A. in American Studies from Carleton College (1995) and an M.A. (1997) and Ph.D. (2004) in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also studied at Keio University (Japan) and Nankai University (China).

Hiroshi is the author of Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Cornell University Press, 2010), which won the Shimizu Hiroshi Book Award from the Japanese Association for American Studies and the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies Book Prize. Its Japanese-language version, Haisen to Hariuddo: senryoka Nihon no bunka saiken, appeared from Nagoya University Press in 2014. He has received grants and fellowships from the Japan Foundation, the Toyota Foundation, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and the Reves Center for International Studies at William and Mary.

At William and Mary, Hiroshi teaches classes on U.S.-foreign relations, global U.S. history, the nuclear world, the Cold War and Asia, film and society, and slow food. He contributes to the American Studies, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Film and Media Studies, and International Relations programs.

Currently, Hiroshi is at work on two projects: a cultural history of “high growth” in post-World War II Japan and a monograph on popular culture and imperial formations across the Pacific.